AIG: It's not the bonuses, it's the crime - Updated

Josh Marshall and the investigative team at TPM are digging into the public records of AIG and hitting a bedrock of deceit and corruption.

To give a little more background, a mix of congressional testimony, SEC filings and news reports suggest that there were concerns and suspicions going back at least to 2005 that Joe Cassano wasn't letting AIG corporate or anyone else look at his divisions books. Remember, this is the divisions where the CDSs were written, the ones that played substantial role in triggering the global financial crisis. The auditor they installed to find out what was going on was shut out. Their accountancy, PricewaterhouseCoopers, was disturbed by what it saw and felt obliged to note what was happening in SEC filings. Employment and compensation contracts aren't the issue here. That is a distraction. Think more in terms of RICO. Let us know more about the on-going criminal probe.

I've been thinking for weeks now that this is a RICO prosecution waiting to happen. And that is what it's going to take to calm down the public.

The focus of the anger is on the bonuses but that is not really what's driving it. People are pissed off because even the lowest info voter knows these guys screwed us and the perception is they're being rewarded instead of punished. Because they are. I continue to think that seeing a few indictments instead of endless rounds of "retention bonuses" would calm everybody down and restore consumer confidence.

Update: They're moving at the speed of light at TPM. The main perp has a name and the evidence mounts.

[More posts daily at The Detroit News]